Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. Navy in Vietnam and
member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, charged that the
government's exoneration of Agent Orange was “politically
motivated to cover up the true effects of dioxin, and manipulate
public perception.”

This is the forgotten story of the shameful nexus between
politics-industry-scientists to poison the living and the future
generations by terming the toxic chemical as safe for humans and
environment. There are an estimated 650,000 like Hong Hanh in Vietnam,
suffering from an array of baffling chronic conditions. Another 500,000
have already died. We are talking of the most toxic molecule known to
science -- Agent Orange -- sprayed during a prolonged military campaign
in the Vietnam war.

The company which manufactured and marketed Agent Orange, has now
moved into genetic engineering. This is the company, which former US
President Bill Clinton once remarked: "...will lead us into 21st
century."

Nearly 30 years after the Vietnam war, the chemical weapon used by US
troops is still exacting a hideous toll on each new generation. Cathy
Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy report.

Spectre Orange

CATHY SCOTT-CLARK & ADRIAN LEVY / The Guardian
29mar03

Hong Hanh is falling to pieces. She has been poisoned by the most
toxic molecule known to science; it was sprayed during a prolonged
military campaign. The contamination persists. No redress has been
offered, no compensation. The superpower that spread the toxin has done
nothing to combat the medical and environmental catastrophe that is
overwhelming her country. This is not northern Iraq, where Saddam
Hussein gassed 5,000 Kurds in 1988. Nor the trenches of first world war
France. Hong Hanh's story, and that of many more like her, is quietly
unfolding in Vietnam today. Her declining half-life is spent unseen, in
her home, an unremarkable concrete box in Ho Chi Minh City, filled with
photographs, family plaques and yellow enamel stars, a place where the
best is made of the worst.

Hong Hanh is both surprising and terrifying. Here is a 19-year-old
who lives in a 10-year-old's body. She clatters around with disjointed
spidery strides which leave her soaked in sweat. When she cannot stop
crying, soothing creams and iodine are rubbed into her back, which is a
lunar collage of septic blisters and scabs. "My daughter is
dying," her mother says. "My youngest daughter is 11 and she
has the same symptoms. What should we do? Their fingers and toes stick
together before they drop off. Their hands wear down to stumps. Every
day they lose a little more skin. And this is not leprosy. The doctors
say it is connected to American chemical weapons we were exposed to
during the Vietnam war."

There are an estimated 650,000 like Hong Hanh in Vietnam, suffering
from an array of baffling chronic conditions. Another 500,000 have
already died. The thread that weaves through all their case histories is
defoliants deployed by the US military during the war. Some of the
victims are veterans who were doused in these chemicals during the war,
others are farmers who lived off land that was sprayed. The second
generation are the sons and daughters of war veterans, or children born
to parents who lived on contaminated land. Now there is a third
generation, the grandchildren of the war and its victims.

This is a chain of events bitterly denied by the US government.
Millions of litres of defoliants such as Agent Orange were dropped on
Vietnam, but US government scientists claimed that these chemicals were
harmless to humans and short-lived in the environment. US strategists
argue that Agent Orange was a prototype smart weapon, a benign tactical
herbicide that saved many hundreds of thousands of American lives by
denying the North Vietnamese army the jungle cover that allowed it
ruthlessly to strike and feint.

"In Vietnam the US had conducted the
"largest chemical warfare campaign in history."

Scientists at a
conference at Yale University in April 20

New scientific research, however, confirms what the Vietnamese have
been claiming for years. It also portrays the US government as one that
has illicitly used weapons of mass destruction, stymied all independent
efforts to assess the impact of their deployment, failed to acknowledge
cold, hard evidence of maiming and slaughter, and pursued a policy of
evasion and deception.

Teams of international scientists working in Vietnam have now
discovered that Agent Orange contains one of the most virulent poisons
known to man, a strain of dioxin called TCCD which, 28 years after the
fighting ended, remains in the soil, continuing to destroy the lives of
those exposed to it. Evidence has also emerged that the US government
not only knew that Agent Orange was contaminated, but was fully aware of
the killing power of its contaminant dioxin, and yet still continued to
use the herbicide in Vietnam for 10 years of the war and in
concentrations that exceeded its own guidelines by 25 times. As well as
spraying the North Vietnamese, the US doused its own troops stationed in
the jungle, rather than lose tactical advantage by having them withdraw.

On February 5, addressing the UN Security Council, secretary of state
Colin Powell, now famously, clutched between his fingers a tiny phial
representing concentrated anthrax spores, enough to kill thousands, and
only a tiny fraction of the amount he said Saddam Hussein had at his
disposal. The Vietnamese government has its own symbolic phial that it,
too, flourishes, in scientific conferences that get little publicity. It
contains 80g of TCCD, just enough of the super-toxin contained in Agent
Orange to fill a child-size talcum powder container. If dropped into the
water supply of a city the size of New York, it would kill the entire
population. Ground-breaking research by Dr Arthur H Westing, former
director of the UN Environment Programme, a leading authority on Agent
Orange, reveals that the US sprayed 170kg of it over Vietnam.

John F Kennedy's presidential victory in 1961 was propelled by an
image of the New Frontier. He called on Americans to "bear the
burden of a long twilight struggle ... against the common enemies of
man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." But one of the
most problematic new frontiers, that dividing North and South Vietnam,
flared up immediately after he had taken office, forcing him to bolster
the US-backed regime in Saigon. Kennedy examined "tricks and
gadgets" that might give the South an edge in the jungle, and in
November 1961 sanctioned the use of defoliants in a covert operation
code-named Ranch Hand, every mission flown signed off by the president
himself and managed in Saigon by the secret Committee 202 - the call
sign for defoliating forests being "20" and for spraying
fields "2".

Ngo Luc, 67, was serving with a North Vietnamese guerrilla unit in
the Central Highlands when he saw planes circling overhead. "We
expected bombs, but a fine yellow mist descended, covering absolutely
everything," he says. "We were soaked in it, but it didn't
worry us, as it smelled good. We continued to crawl through the jungle.
The next day the leaves wilted and within a week the jungle was bald. We
felt just fine at the time." Today, the former captain is the sole
survivor from his unit and lives with his two granddaughters, both born
partially paralysed, near the central Vietnamese city of Hue.

When US troops became directly embroiled in Vietnam in 1964, the
Pentagon signed contracts worth $57m (£36m) with eight US chemical
companies to produce defoliants, including Agent Orange, named after the
coloured band painted around the barrels in which it was shipped. The US
would target the Ho Chi Minh trail - Viet Cong supply lines made
invisible by the jungle canopy along the border with Laos - as well as
the heavily wooded Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) that separated the North
from the South, and also the Mekong Delta, a maze of overgrown swamps
and inlets that was a haven for communist insurgents.

A reporter for the St Louis Dispatch witnessed a secret spraying
mission and wrote that the US was dropping "poison".
Congressman Robert Kastenmeier demanded that the president abandon
"chemical warfare" because it tainted America's reputation.
Instead, William Bundy, a presidential adviser, flatly denied that the
herbicide used by America was a chemical weapon, and blamed communist
propagandists for a distortion of the facts about the Ranch Hand
operation. Only when the Federation of American Scientists warned that
year that Vietnam was being used as a laboratory experiment did the
rumours become irrefutable. More than 5,000 American scientists,
including 17 Nobel laureates and 129 members of the Academy of Sciences,
signed a petition against "chemical and biological weapons used in
Vietnam".

Eight years after the military launched Operation Ranch Hand,
scientists from the National Institute of Health warned that laboratory
mice exposed to Agent Orange were giving birth to stillborn or deformed
litters, a conclusion reinforced by research conducted by the US
department of agriculture. These findings coincided with newspaper
reports in Hanoi that blamed Agent Orange for a range of crippling
conditions among troops and their families. Dr Le Ke Son, a young
conscript in Hanoi during the war and now director of Vietnam's Agent
Orange Victims Fund, recalls, "The government proposed that a line
of runners carry blood and tissue samples from the front to Hanoi. But
it was more than 500 miles and took two months, by which time the
samples were spoiled. How could we make the research work?

There was no way to prove what we could see with our own eyes."
In December 1969, President Nixon made a radical and controversial
pledge that America would never use chemical weapons in a first strike.
He made no mention of Vietnam or Agent Orange, and the US government
continued dispatching supplies of herbicides to the South Vietnamese
regime until 1974.

That year, Kiem was born in a one-room hut in Kim Doi, a village just
outside Hue. For her mother, Nguyen, she should have been a consolation
because her husband, a Viet Cong soldier, had been killed several months
earlier. "The last time he came home, he told me about the spray,
how his unit had been doused in a sweet-smelling mist and all the leaves
had fallen from the trees," Nguyen says. It soon became obvious
that Kiem was severely mentally and physically disabled. "She can
eat, she can smile, she sits on the bed. That's it. I have barely left
my home since my daughter was born."

By the time the war finally ended in 1975, more than 10% of Vietnam
had been intensively sprayed with 72 million litres of chemicals, of
which 66% was Agent Orange, laced with its super-strain of toxic TCCD.
But even these figures, contained in recently declassified US military
records, vastly underestimate the true scale of the spraying. In
confidential statements made to US scientists, former Ranch Hand pilots
allege that, in addition to the recorded missions, there were 26,000
aborted operations during which 260,000 gallons of herbicide were
dumped. US military regulations required all spray planes or helicopters
to return to base empty and one pilot, formerly stationed at Bien Hoa
air base between 1968 and 1969, claims that he regularly jettisoned his
chemical load into the Long Binh reservoir.

"These herbicides should never have been used in the way that
they were used," says the pilot, who has asked not to be
identified. Almost immediately after the war finished, US veterans began
reporting chronic conditions, skin disorders, asthma, cancers,
gastrointestinal diseases. Their babies were born limbless or with
Down's syndrome and spina bifida. But it would be three years before the
US department of veterans' affairs reluctantly agreed to back a medical
investigation, examining 300,000 former servicemen - only a fraction of
those who had complained of being sick - with the government warning all
participants that it was indemnified from lawsuits brought by them. When
rumours began circulating that President Reagan had told scientists not
to make "any link" between Agent Orange and the deteriorating
health of veterans, the victims lost patience with their government and
sued the defoliant manufacturers in an action that was finally settled
out of court in 1984 for $180m (£115m).

It would take the intervention of the former commander of the US Navy
in Vietnam, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, for the government finally to admit
that it had been aware of the potential dangers of the chemicals used in
Vietnam from the start of Ranch Hand. The admiral's involvement stemmed
from a deathbed pledge to his son, a patrol boat captain who contracted
two forms of cancer that he believed had been caused by his exposure to
Agent Orange.

Every day during the war, Captain Elmo Zumwalt Jr had swum in a river
from which he had also eaten fish, in an area that was regularly sprayed
with the herbicide. Two years after his son's death in 1988, Zumwalt
used his leverage within the military establishment to compile a
classified report, which he presented to the secretary of the department
of veterans' affairs and which contained data linking Agent Orange to 28
life-threatening conditions, including bone cancer, skin cancer, brain
cancer - in fact, almost every cancer known to man - in addition to
chronic skin disorders, birth defects, gastrointestinal diseases and
neurological defects.

Zumwalt also uncovered irrefutable evidence that the US military had
dispensed "Agent Orange in concentrations six to 25 times the
suggested rate" and that "4.2m US soldiers could have made
transient or significant contact with the herbicides because of
Operation Ranch Hand". This speculative figure is twice the
official estimate of US veterans who may have been contaminated with
TCCD.

Most damning and politically sensitive of all is a letter, obtained
by Zumwalt, from Dr James Clary, a military scientist who designed the
spray tanks for Ranch Hand. Writing in 1988 to a member of Congress
investigating Agent Orange, Clary admitted: "When we initiated the
herbicide programme in the 1960s, we were aware of the potential for
damage due to dioxin contamination in the herbicide. We were even aware
that the military formulation had a higher dioxin concentration than the
civilian version, due to the lower cost and speed of manufacture.
However, because the material was to be used on the enemy, none of us
were overly concerned."

The Office of Genetic Counselling and Disabled Children (OGCDC)
operates out of a room little bigger than a broom cupboard. Dr Viet Nhan
and his 21 volunteers share their cramped quarters at Hue Medical
College with cerebral spinal fluid shunt kits donated from Norfolk,
Virginia; children's clothes given by the Rotary Club of Osaka, Japan;
second-hand computers scavenged from banks in Singapore.

Vietnam's chaotic and underfunded national health service cannot cope
with the demands made upon it. The Vietnamese Red Cross has registered
an estimated one million people disabled by Agent Orange, but has
sufficient funds to help only one fifth of them, paying out an average
of $5 (£3) a month. Dr Nhan established the free OGCDC, having studied
the impact of Agent Orange as a student, to match Vietnamese families to
foreign private financial donors. "It was only when I went out to
the villages looking for case studies that I realised how many families
were affected and how few could afford help," he says. "I
abandoned my research. Children need to run before they die."

The walls of his room are plastered with bewildering photographs of
those he has helped: operations for hernias and cleft palates,
open-heart surgery and kidney transplants. All of the patients come from
isolated districts in central Vietnam, villages whose names will be
unfamiliar, unlike the locations that surround them: Khe Sanh, Hamburger
Hill, Camp Carroll and the Rock Pile. "I am not interested in
apportioning blame," Nhan says. "I don't want to talk to you
about science or politics. What I care about is that I have 60 sick
children needing financial backers. They cannot wait for the US to
change its policy, take its head out of the sand and clear up the
mess."

He takes us into an intensive care ward to meet nine-year-old Nguyen
Van Tan, who two weeks before had open-heart surgery to correct a birth
defect thought to be connected to dioxin poisoning. There is no hard
proof of this, but his father, who sits beside the bed, talks of being
sprayed with defoliants when he fought with the Viet Cong. The area they
live in was repeatedly doused during the war. Almost all of his former
battlefield comrades have disabled children, he says. Nhan ushers us
away. "I don't want to tell the family yet, but their boy will
never fully recover. He is already suffering from total paralysis. The
most we can do now is send them home with a little money."

Back in his tiny office, the doctor gestures to photocopies of US Air
Force maps, sent by a veterans' organisation because the US government
refuses to supply them. These dizzying charts depict the number of
herbicide missions carried out over Quang Tri, a province adjacent to
the DMZ, from where almost all Nhan's patients come. Its topography is
obliterated by spray lines, 741,143 gallons of chemicals dropped here,
more than 600,000 of them being Agent Orange. "I'm just scratching
the surface," he says.

The Vietnamese government is reluctant to let us travel to Quang Tri
province. It does not want us "to poke and prod" already
dismal villagers, treating them as if they are medical exhibits. We
attempt to recruit some high-powered support and arrange a meeting in
Hanoi with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, who until last year was the
vice-president of Vietnam. She receives us at the presidential palace in
a teak-panelled hall beneath an enormous photograph of Ho Chi Minh in a
gold frame writhing with dragons. "Thank you, my young friends, for
your interest in Vietnam," Madame Binh says, straightening her grey
silk ao dai, a traditional flowing trouser suit.

She looks genteel, but old photographs of her in olive fatigues
suggest she is a seasoned campaigner. As minister of foreign affairs for
the Provisional Revolutionary South Vietnamese government, she
negotiated at the Paris peace talks in 1973. "I must warn you, I
will not answer questions about George W Bush," she says, casting a
steely gaze, perhaps conscious of the fact that, since the lifting of
the US economic embargo in 1994, trade with America has grown to £650m
a year.

Madame Binh does, however, want to talk about chemical warfare,
recalling how, when she returned after the war to her home province of
Quang Nam, a lush region south-west of Hue which was drenched in
defoliants, she found "no sign of life, just rubble and
grass". She says: "All of our returning veterans had a burning
desire for children to repopulate our devastated country. When the first
child was born with a birth defect, they tried again and again. So many
families now have four or five disabled children, raising them without
any hope."

What should the US do? Madame Binh laughs. "It's very late to do
anything. We put this issue directly on the table with the US. So far
they have not dealt with the problem. If our relationship is ever to be
normal, the US has to accept responsibility. Go and see the situation
for yourself." She sends us back to Hue. Over chilled water and
tangerines, we talk to a suspicious party secretary who asks us why we
have bothered to come after all these years. "There is no
point," he says. "Nothing will come of it."

But he opens his file all the same and reads aloud: "In Hue city
there are 6,633 households affected by Agent Orange and in them 3,708
sick children under the age of 16." He eventually agrees to take us
north-west, over the Perfume river, beyond the ancient royal tombs that
circle this former imperial city, towards the DMZ. We arrive at a
distant commune where a handyman is sprucing up a bust of Ho Chi Minh
with white gloss paint.

Eventually, the chairman of the People's Committee of Dang Ha joins
us, and our political charabanc stuffed with seven officials sets out
across the green and gold countryside, along crisscrossing lanes. The
chairman tells us proudly how he was born on January 31 1968, the night
of the Tet offensive, the turning point of the war, when the Viet Cong
launched its assault on US positions. By the time we stop, we are all
the best of friends and, holding hands, he pulls us into the home of the
Pham family, where a wall of neighbours and an assembly of local
dignitaries dressed in shiny, double-breasted jackets stare grimly at a
moaning child.

He lies on a mat on the floor, his matchstick limbs folded uselessly
before him, his parents taking it in turns to mop his mouth, as if
without them he would drown in his own saliva. Hoi, the boy's mother,
tells us how she met her husband when they were assigned to the same
Viet Cong unit in which they fought together for 10 years. But she alone
was ordered to the battle of Troung Hon mountain. "I saw this
powder falling from the sky," she says. "I felt sick, had a
headache. I was sent to a field hospital. I was close to the gates of
hell. By the time I was discharged, I had lost the strength in my legs
and they have never fully recovered. Then Ky was born, our son, with
yellow skin.

Every year his problems get worse." Her husband, Hung,
interrupts: "Sometimes, we have been so desperate for money that we
have begged in the local market. I do not think you can imagine the
humiliation of that." And this family is not alone. All the adults
here, cycling past us or strolling along the dykes, are suffering from
skin lesions and goitres that cling to necks like sagging balloons. The
women spontaneously abort or give birth to genderless squabs that
horrify even the most experienced midwives.

In a yard, Nguyen, a neighbour's child, stares into space. He has a
hydrocephalic head as large as a melon. Two houses down, Tan has
distended eyes that bubble from his face. By the river, Ngoc is
sleeping, so wan he resembles a pressed flower. "They told me the
boy is depressed," his exhausted father tells us. "Of course
he's depressed. He lives with disease and death."

This is not a specially constructed ghetto used to wage a propaganda
war against imperialism. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam has long
embraced the free market. This is an ordinary hamlet where, in these new
liberal times, villagers like to argue about the English Premiership
football results over a glass of home-brewed rice beer. Here live three
generations affected by Agent Orange: veterans who were sprayed during
the war and their successors who inherited the contamination or who
still farm on land that was sprayed. Vietnam's impoverished scientific
community is now trying to determine if there will be a fourth
generation. "How long will this go on?" asks Dr Tran Manh
Hung, the ministry of health's leading researcher.

Dr Hung is now working with a team of Canadian environmental
scientists, Hatfield Consultants, and they have made an alarming
discovery. In the Aluoi Valley, adjacent to the Ho Chi Minh trail, once
home to three US Special Forces bases, a region where Agent Orange was
both stored and sprayed, the scientists' analysis has shown that, rather
than naturally disperse, the dioxin has remained in the ground in
concentrations 100 times above the safety levels for agricultural land
in Canada.

It has spread into Aluoi's ponds, rivers and irrigation supplies,
from where it has passed into the food chain, through fish and
freshwater shellfish, chicken and ducks that store TCCD in fatty tissue.
Samples of human blood and breast milk reveal that villagers have
ingested the invisible toxin and that pregnant women pass it through the
placenta to the foetus and then through their breast milk, doubly
infecting newborn babies. Is it, then, a coincidence that in this
minuscule region of Vietnam, more than 15,000 children and adults have
already been registered as suffering from the usual array of chronic
conditions?

"We theorise that the Aluoi Valley is a microcosm of the
country, where numerous reservoirs of TCCD still exist in the soil of
former US military installations," says Dr Wayne Dwernychuk,
vice-president of Hatfield Consultants. There may be as many as 50 of
these "hot spots", including one at the former US military
base of Bien Hoa, where, according to declassified defence department
documents, US forces spilled 7,500 gallons of Agent Orange on March 1
1970. Dr Arnold Schecter, a leading expert in dioxin contamination in
the US, sampled the soil there and found it to contain TCCD levels that
were 180 million times above the safe level set by the US environmental
protection agency.

It is extremely difficult to decontaminate humans or the soil. A
World Health Organisation briefing paper warns: "Once TCCD has
entered the body it is there to stay due to its uncanny ability to
dissolve in fats and to its rock solid chemical stability." At
Aluoi, the researchers recommended the immediate evacuation of the worst
affected villages, but to be certain of containing this hot spot, the
WHO also recommends searing the land with temperatures of more than
1,000C, or encasing it in concrete before treating it chemically.

At home, the US takes heed. When a dump at the Robins Air Force Base
in Georgia was found to have stored Agent Orange, it was placed on a
National Priority List, immediately capped in five feet of clay and
sand, and has since been the subject of seven investigations. Dioxin is
now also a major domestic concern, scientists having discovered that it
is a by-product of many ordinary industrial processes, including
smelting, the bleaching of paper pulp and solid waste incineration. The
US environmental protection agency, pressed into a 12-year inquiry,
recently concluded that it is a "class-1 human carcinogen".

The evidence is categoric. Last April, a conference at Yale
University attended by the world's leading environmental scientists, who
reviewed the latest research, concluded that in Vietnam the US had
conducted the "largest chemical warfare campaign in history".
And yet no money is forthcoming, no aid in kind. For the US, there has
only ever been one contemporary incident of note involving weapons of
mass destruction - Colin Powell told the UN Security Council in February
that, "in the history of chemical warfare, no country has had more
battlefield experience with chemical weapons since world war one than
Saddam Hussein's Iraq".

The US government has yet to respond to the Hatfield Consultants'
report, which finally explains why the Vietnamese are still dying so
many years after the war is over, but, last March, it did make its first
contribution to the debate in Vietnam. It signed an agreement with a
reluctant Vietnamese government for an $850,000 (£543,000) programme to
"fill identified data gaps" in the study of Agent Orange. The
conference in Hanoi that announced the decision, according to Vietnamese
Red Cross representatives who attended, ate up a large slice of this
funding. One of the signatories is the same US environmental protection
agency that has already concluded that dioxin causes cancer.

"Studies can be proposed until hell freezes over," says Dr
Dwernychuk of Hatfield Consultants, "but they are not going to
assist the Vietnamese in a humanitarian sense one iota. We state
emphatically that no additional research on human health is required to
facilitate intervention or to protect the local citizens."

There is cash to be lavished in Vietnam when the US government sees
it as politically expedient. Over the past 10 years, more than $350m
(£223m) has been spent on chasing ghosts. In 1992, the US launched the
Joint Task Force-Full Accounting to locate 2,267 servicemen thought to
be missing in action in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Jerry O'Hara,
spokesman for JTF-FA, which is still searching for the remains of 1,889
of them, told us, "We don't place a monetary value on what we do
and we'll be here until we have brought all of the boys back home."

So it is that America continues to spend considerably more on the
dead than it does on the millions of living and long-suffering - be they
back home or in Vietnam. The science of chemical warfare fills a silent,
white-tiled room at Tu Du hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Here, shelves
are overburdened with research materials. Behind the locked door is an
iridescent wall of the mutated and misshapen, hundreds of bell jars and
vacuum-sealed bottles in which human foetuses float in formaldehyde.
Some appear to be sleeping, fingers curling their hair, thumbs pressing
at their lips, while others with multiple heads and mangled limbs are
listless and slumped. Thankfully, none of these dioxin babies ever woke
up.

One floor below, it is never quiet. Here are those who have survived
the misery of their births, ravaged infants whom no one has the ability
to understand, babies so traumatised by their own disabilities, luckless
children so enraged and depressed at their miserable fate, that they are
tied to their beds just to keep them safe from harm.